BBC boss Mark Thompson under pressure to cut executive pay

Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, has faced calls to cut the
salaries and expenses of the corporation’s most senior executives.

Mark Thompson charged £2,236.90 to fly his family homePhoto: PA

By Andrew Pierce and Anita Singh

10:29PM BST 25 Jun 2009

The broadcaster’s 50 highest-paid executives earned up to £13.6 million last year, with well over half paid considerably more than the Prime Minister.

The figures, released for the first time under the Freedom of Information Act, came on a day that the private sector again bore the brunt of job losses, further raising unemployment that is at its highest level for 12 years. Corus, the steel-maker, announced 2,000 more redundancies and some staff at British Airways agreed to work without pay for one month.

The anger over the BBC pay structure comes as more than three quarters of Britons believe that public spending should be cut over the next few years, according to an opinion poll for today’s Daily Telegraph.

The BBC had hoped that by publishing the salaries of its top 50 executives in the aftermath of the disclosures over MPs’ expenses, they would demonstrate that they were being cautious with licence payers’ money. However, the disclosure that 47 of the leading 50 are in salary brackets that range from £190,000 to more than £600,000 triggered an angry reaction from MPs and trade unions. Gordon Brown earns £194,250.

The broadcasting unions, who have agreed to more than 2,000 redundancies at the BBC in the past two years, were enraged by the pay of the senior executives. They include Richard Klein, the controller of BBC Four, which is watched by 0.5 per cent of the viewing public, who is paid between £190,000 and £220,000. Nicholas Eldred, the group general counsel and secretary, operations group, and Mike Goodie, the director of employee relations and people strategy, are in the same pay bracket.

Although the corporation agreed to publish executives’ salaries, it again refused to disclose the multi-million-pound pay deals of the biggest stars such as Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton.

The expenses claims of the 10 most senior executives from the past five years showed:

* Mr Thompson, the director-general, whose basic salary is £647,000, claimed £77,823.35 including £2,236.90 to fly his family home from a holiday to deal with the fall-out from the lewd messages left by Ross and Russell Brand on the answering machine of Andrew Sachs.

* More than £2,000 was spent at the Las Vegas hotel featured in the film Ocean’s Eleven as part of the corporation’s £45?million annual bill for accommodation and travel.

* Jana Bennett, the director of BBC Vision and the highest-paid woman at the BBC on £406,000, claimed almost £2,000 in expenses for flowers.

* Dame Jenny Abramsky, who was head of audio and music and who earned £327,000, spent £1,137.55 on a dinner to mark Sir Terry Wogan’s knighthood.

John Whittingdale, the Tory chairman of the Commons culture committee, led the criticism of the BBC salaries. He said that the BBC could no longer justify the sums it paid to its senior executives.

“One of the reasons why it was important that this information about salaries was made public is that there is increasing concern that the BBC is not paying market rates,” he said. “They are far in excess of what any commercial broadcaster could afford.”

Martin Bell, the former BBC correspondent who became an anti-sleaze MP, said senior pay had to be cut. “The BBC has to show restraint in its salaries,” he said. “I don’t buy the line that these people could be earning more money in the private sector, because commercial broadcasters are in serious trouble at the moment.”

Mr Bell added that the buck ultimately stopped with Mr Thompson, whose total remuneration, including benefits, amounts to £816,000 a year. “The man at the top is supposed to show leadership.”

The BBC’s total budget, which now stands at £3.6?billion, is already under pressure from the Government, which has proposed “top slicing” some of the licence fee for commercial rivals. The proposal has been fiercely resisted by the corporation.